


Mahamaya-tantra

by severinne



Category: Life on Mars (UK)
Genre: Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-17
Updated: 2008-05-17
Packaged: 2017-10-15 01:39:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/155668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/severinne/pseuds/severinne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Dharmic philosophy, Maya is the force that sublimates reality into dreams; in her relationship with Sam, she is the alibi for what he refuses to admit to himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mahamaya-tantra

  
At times like now, with Sam on his knees and the heel of her black patent shoe digging into the back of his best grey wool suit, Maya could easily overlook the negative points of dating her superior officer.

Actually, if she were completely honest – and with his tongue moving like _that_ , so quick and eager, how could she be anything but honest? – knowing that the man at her feet was her DCI just made every orgasm that much better.

Maya hummed her pleasure, bracing her shoulders against the door of Sam’s flat and tilting her hips forward, her hand at the back of his head keeping him firmly set upon his task. Not that he needed much encouragement – Sam had dropped to his knees just as soon as they had come home from presenting their quarterly report to Superintendent Middleton, drawing her stocking-clad leg over his shoulder and pushing beneath her skirt to mouth hotly over the lace of her knickers, long since pushed aside to make way for the feverish push of Sam’s tongue and fingers stroking silken and hot inside her.

A flutter of inarticulate cries spilled from her lips as her entire body convulsed in the throes of orgasm, clenching hard around Sam’s fingers and fiercely riding the wet slide of his tongue against her clit. She gripped his head harder, felt her heel dig deeper into his back, worried in a fleeting moment of awareness that she might be hurting Sam but he showed no reaction, kept his fingers firmly lodged inside her, the heel of his hand cradling the trembling aftershocks of her orgasm.

They remained locked in tableau for time far beyond Maya’s reckoning, her breath still gasping short in her breast, Sam’s free hand idly playing with the lace edge of her stocking. Distantly, she felt the slick smudge of a kiss against her raised inner thigh followed by the gentle motions of Sam lowering her leg, arranging her clothes into their former respectability.

She glanced down the stretch of her body, watching Sam smooth her black skirt from hip to knee with a neat, precise gesture. ‘Come here,’ she murmured lazily, reaching down and stroking his shoulder. He rose at her touch, his mouth and chin still glistening with the traces of her arousal. ‘Let me…’ She brushed her fingers down the front of his neatly buttoned suit towards his trousers, her touch stuttering over the confusion of something seemingly absent before Sam withdrew entirely, taking a step backward and wiping at his mouth with two fingers.

‘That’s alright.’ He gave her a thin smile. ‘Just wanted to do that for you.’ Leaning in, he planted a quick, chaste peck on her cheek.

Maya’s eyes panned down, noting the smooth fit of his trousers across his hips. ‘Oh.’

‘Shall I get dinner going?’ Sam loosened his tie and turned away, crossing the open-plan living area towards the shining chrome of his kitchen. ‘I was thinking paella, how does that sound?’

Exhaling unsteadily, Maya pushed away from the door and toed off her shoes. ‘Sounds lovely,’ she called, all false cheer. It was all the speech she could muster before the clang of cast iron pans took over.

* * *

‘You go on without me.’

‘Sam…’ Maya forced a warning tone into her voice, hoping it would conceal her mounting disappointment. ‘She’s expecting us both for tea, you know that.’

‘And I’ve got ‘eaps of paperwork to push through ‘ere.’ Sam slumped down in his desk chair and tapped a few keys at his PC. ‘She doesn’t like me anyway,’ he added in a low mumble.

Maya rolled her eyes. ‘Of course she likes you, you’re being silly.’

The blue light from the monitor bounced across Sam’s eyes, obscuring any expression they may have offered. ‘Am not. Always bloody frowning at me whenever I come round.’ He glanced up at her, something like shame pulling at his eyebrows. ‘Probably wishes you were dating a brilliant surgeon or a rich barrister or summat.’

‘You’ve got to be joking.’ Maya laughed incredulously. ‘Sam, _you’re_ brilliant. Why would she ever disapprove of you?’

‘You tell me.’ Sam sullenly looked back to the computer screen.

‘You’ll laugh.’

‘Probably not.’

Maya couldn’t help but concede the point, though she wasn’t about to tell Sam that much. ‘Okay, well, just the once, mind, she told me you reminded her of some creepy detective she met back in the seventies. Round the time she was pregnant with me. Said this bloke was quite obsessed with her…’

‘That makes absolutely no sense,’ Sam interrupted flatly.

‘I’m just telling you what she said.’ Maya shrugged, attempted a wry smile. It didn’t matter if it failed or not since he wasn’t looking, seemingly engrossed in something on the computer screen. ‘She doesn’t remember what he was called, but said you’re dead identical… best as she can recall, I guess.’

‘Still don’t see how that’s my fault.’

‘I never said it was your fault!’ She flicked her hand through the air impatiently as she stalked around his desk. ‘You asked, I told you. End of story. Now, leave the damn paperwork and let’s get going before we’re late and she’s really got a reason to be upset with you.’

Sam leaned back in his chair, staring up at her with the sort of empty expression that made Maya want to either slap him or make a grab for his cock, anything to bring him to life. Instead, she offered a gentle smile and stroked her palm over his short hair, smiling wider when Sam closed his eyes and leaned into her touch. He was like a cat, really, pressing firmly into her hand, demanding to be scratched harder.

She wondered if Sam had ever owned a cat. Might do him a world of good, if he liked cats at all.

‘Alright.’ Sighing softly, Sam wheeled his chair back and stood up, rolling his head back on the stretching column of his neck. He winced and rubbed at a stiff muscle at his nape, throwing Maya a somewhat sheepish look that drained years from his tired face. ‘Bloody hate paperwork anyway, why’s there so much of this shite?’

‘Oh, poor Sam, I know,’ she said, playfully commiserating as she slinked her arms around his waist and pressed a line of light kisses up the side of his long throat. ‘I’ll give you a hand with it tomorrow, alright? Now, c’mon, don’t want to keep Mum waiting.’

‘Mmn, God forbid.’ Sam nosed gently through her hair. Maya knew from experience that he was likely inhaling the smell of her shampoo with the tenacity of a bloodhound. ‘Otherwise, I might have survived whatever mad concoction she has in store for us this time.’

‘Oi! Behave yourself.’ Laughing, Maya pushed him towards the door with a light-hearted smack to his arse, smirking knowingly when he faltered and blushed before walking out the door.

* * *

‘Harder,’ Sam gasped.

Maya bit her lower lip, fighting a smug grin as she happily complied. The frenetic pace he had already set rutting over and into her made it easy to work the dildo inside him, Sam penetrating himself on every backward motion. Sliding down the sweating length of his body with her free hand, she gripped his right buttock, forcing his cheeks wider apart and thrusting brutally hard into Sam’s lube-slicked hole. He moaned wantonly, stilling his hips under the fingernail-piercing grip of her hand and burying his face in the crook of her neck, panting hot and hard against her damp skin.

She had fantasized about this from the early, awkward days of their office courtship: of taking her DCI far beyond his staid, button-down limits, of shocking him with whispered suggestions of the many kinky things she dreamt of doing to him, of watching Sam squirm uncomfortably the first time she would dare to tease behind his balls, fingering his arse and making him learn to like it despite himself. How he would blush, uncertain and nervous, maybe beg her to stop even as his cock hardened for her.

While not playing precisely to her imagination, the reality of the thing had been no less enjoyable. Instead of shy protests, Maya had received a long, guttural groan the first time she explored the puckered flesh of his opening during a particularly thorough blowjob. By the time Sam came in her mouth, he was riding her fingers and nearly sobbing with the intensity of his orgasm as both pleasures tore him apart from the inside out. Fact was, playing with his arse proved a surefire way to transform her cool, reserved DCI Tyler into a writhing whore, and she seldom passed up the opportunity to do just that, using her fingers and their carefully selected assortment of toys to penetrate him, to drag him helplessly to orgasm time and again.

She did, however, demure from purchasing the strap-on they had spotted in their preferred shop that one afternoon. As much as the very thought of fucking Sam could set her moist and throbbing in seconds, the intense hunger in Sam’s eyes had given her pause. Her Sam, so quick to surrender so much of himself, could also be dangerously needy, could become a selfish lover if given half a chance.

And he wasn’t the only one in this relationship in need of a good fuck.

Arching restlessly, Maya lifted her restraining hand, smacking his arse. ‘Not paying you to just lie there, slut.’ Breathless though she was, Maya bit out the words as sharply as she could, clenching herself hard around his cock in unspoken emphasis, goading him further. Playing their game. ‘Fuck me, _now_.’

Whimpering softly into her neck, Sam obeyed.

* * *

 _Involuntary motor response._ That was the turn of phrase that was meant to keep her fixed to his bedside, in hopes of glimpsing a twitch or hearing a vague murmur. A smile, if Ruth’s ranting these days was to be believed.

Maya crossed her arms and frowned down at Sam’s crisp, pale form. Thin-limbed, dressed in a wisp of a hospital gown, draped by thin sheets that altogether did more to reveal his body than give him any privacy. Her eyes tracked down to his feet, back up to his blank, insensate face. Halfway down again. _Involuntary motor response._

At times like this, she couldn’t bring herself to touch him. His inability to choose or refuse made it wrong in her eyes, knowing her Sam as a thoughtful, considerate lover who would never dare take advantage of any line of impropriety, no matter how blurred or enticing. Her Sam was beyond chivalry, had attuned himself to the needs and wishes of the women around him with startling clarity.

He had nowhere near that degree of empathy with men and their morals, both of which he tended to view with the mixed trepidation and fascination of a schoolboy in awe of that girl in his class who was just starting to show the differences of womanhood. Watching and wanting what they were, he kept his distance all the same. Her Sam just never seemed to understand what the men around him were thinking and feeling.

Maya wondered if Sam, in turn, even understood himself.

* * *

Besides being a cunning bastard of a drug dealer, Nathan Baxter was a physically powerful man. Broad-shouldered and heavily built, he’d had no difficulty pinning Sam face-first against the wall of the warehouse where they had come to make the arrest, twisting one of his arms up behind his back and leaning in with his full weight, breathing threats into Sam’s ear that Maya couldn’t hear. Sam had gone hauntingly still in Baxter’s grasp, breathing quick and shallow, no doubt as shocked as she was by the sudden danger.

This sort of thing simply didn’t happen, not in real life.

Maya had trained her gun on Baxter immediately, though she hadn’t fired a shot since her last requisite target range session over a year ago, her panic turning to anger when Baxter refused to back down, turning to blind relief when he finally relented with the arrival of three units of armed back-up.

Maya watched as Sam watched Baxter being dragged away with carefully shuttered eyes.

Forty minutes later, on an unscheduled detour to Sam’s flat, Maya watched him even more closely while she rode his cock, her hands pinning his wrists to the floor on either side of his head. His eyes were tightly shut, a frown smeared across any signs of pleasure she hoped to find in his face.

He shifted uneasily beneath her, his head tossing from side to side, arching back to expose his throat. ‘Please…’ he breathed, pleading, ‘oh, God… please…’

‘Sam?’ Maya slowed the movement of her hips and loosened her hold on his wrists, gasping as he thrashed violently and his eyes snapped open, flashing hot and desperate.

‘No,’ he demanded, his voice breaking slightly. ‘No, don’t stop – ‘

‘Dammit, Sam,’ Maya snapped, fear making her lash out angrily. She renewed her grip on his wrists, tighter than before, and slammed his trapped hands into the kitchen tiles, hard, just the once as she began pumping her hips again, fucking hard enough to leave bruises on them both.

Sam came hard inside her, shouting, three seconds later.

* * *

‘Where do you think he’s gone?’ Ruth was arranging and rearranging one of Sam’s hands, careful of the IV needle piercing the vein while flexing his smooth fingers into poses of liveliness.

Maya stood back from the bed, dragging her hand across the privacy curtain behind her, making the thin fabric ripple and drag through space while she finally forced herself to consider Ruth’s question, asked so many times before.

He was comatose. He was in a hospital bed, trapped between this physical plane and somewhere else, touching the Dharma that is the Sleeping Lord Vishnu, riding on neurostimulants and nutritional drips, his eyes uncovered of the sublimations of Mahamaya, the dream that drags the veil over his eyes even as she reveals the unreality of the real and he will be beyond space, seeing freely through time.

She hoped, wherever he was, it was a place without paperwork.

Shaking her head slightly, Maya looked into Ruth’s watery, wide blue eyes. Those weren’t Sam’s eyes, she realized suddenly. He must have his father’s eyes. She had never asked Sam about his father, had never had one herself and never suffered for the lack. Having never mentioned his own father himself, Sam must have felt the same.

Smiling weakly, she released the curtain from her fingers and perched on the edge of Sam’s bed, reaching for Ruth’s restlessly moving hands. ‘He’s where he needs to be.’

* * *

‘What was Baxter saying to you?’ Maya fastened her belt buckle and reached for her discarded blazer.

‘Nothing.’ Sam was already fully dressed, tie tightly knotted and suit fully buttoned, gazing down at his blurred reflection in the stainless steel surface of his kitchen’s island worktop.

Maya sighed. Sam was a terrible liar. ‘I could see him talking to you,’ and she could see it now, how closely Baxter’s sneering lips had brushed his ear. ‘You seemed…’ She paused. She wanted to say _scared_ , but the playback in her head refused to agree completely. ‘Nervous,’ she offered vaguely, though that wasn’t it either.

‘I was fine, Maya.’ Sam’s eyes flickered upward. ‘I’m fine now.’

‘That’s not how it looked.’

His eyebrows arched at her words. ‘And just how did it look, Maya?’

She shook her head helplessly, still unable to articulate her memory of the brief crisis no matter how intently Sam stared her down, silently demanding an answer. ‘That doesn’t matter,’ she said, aiming to soothe with her gentlest tone of voice. ‘Why don’t you tell me how it made you feel?’

‘I…’ Sam frowned at the countertop again, then shook his head, knuckles turning white as he gripped the stainless steel edge harder. ‘No. I’m not a bloody _girl_ , Maya. I don’t need to sit here droning on about my sodding _feelings_ , alright?’

Maya opened her mouth in shock, then snapped it shut, her lips tightening as she met Sam’s stubborn, derisive gaze. ‘I know you’re not a girl, Sam,’ she remarked coolly, letting her eyes settle meaningfully below his belt. ‘But fair enough. We know it made you feel horny as hell, guess we can leave it at that.’

Panic flared in Sam’s widening brown eyes. ‘I’m not – ‘ He cut himself off, taking a deep breath, then pushed away from the counter and strode purposefully out of the kitchen. ‘We shouldn’t have come here,’ he said, clear and clinical. ‘It was unprofessional, with a suspect waiting to be processed back at the station. Let’s go.’

‘Sam, wait – ‘

‘We’ll talk later, DS Roy.’

* * *

Except, Maya recalled bitterly, they never did. She seldom saw her Sam in the two weeks after Baxter’s arrest, no matter how often she found herself working alongside DCI Tyler trying to build a case around Colin Raimes. She took to sleeping at her own flat for a change, frustrated by two nights of listless lovemaking – missionary only, Sam holding her hands without conviction – and gave up on trying to tempt him with suggestive cues left on his desk after she’d seen him stiffly sweep the black leather gloves she’d left there into a drawer as though he had no memory of panting and begging under their touch.

He refused to listen to emotion anymore, his or hers, but Maya was just as stubborn as he could be, and she would prove him wrong. She _did_ prove him wrong, and her triumph in charging into CID in a borrowed shirt with the name of Lauren Chester’s real killer was equal only to her devastation on learning that Sam wouldn’t realize she was right on account of him lying in a hospital bed, oblivious to the world.

For someone like Sam, it was nearly a gift. Unconscious ignorance only made his self-denial that much easier.

The night shift was better for this, with the lights turned low and human traffic reduced to a trickle of nurses, tired and discrete. Ruth had long since gone home, and Maya could pretend that her and Sam were simply home after a long day, slipped sleepily into bed too tired for sex but unable to resist light-fingered, intimate touches to hair and face, to the neck she hadn’t been able to bring herself to kiss for two months now.

She used her fingers where her lips would no longer go, tracing the contour of his mouth and testing the soft, relaxed roundness of his lower lip. There used to be a surprising blush to Sam’s mouth, sensually pink before the coma had stripped his skin of colour. Maya rotated her index finger, pressed the sharp tip of her fingernail to the pale flesh.

A soft, wrenching sound echoed from Sam’s slack lips, vibrated against her finger. Maya stared, frozen, then shuddered as his mouth closed around her fingertip.

The nurses were very attentive, did their best to regulate his body where it had stopped seeing to its own needs, but the plush inner surface of his lips was still deathly dry, his tongue a scratchy thing suckling weakly at her finger. A near-inaudible keening sound from the back of his throat filled his mouth and trembled at her fingertip where it stopped, trapped by the tightening press of his lips around her.

 _Involuntary motor response._

Startled, Maya yanked her hand away and stepped back, wiping her finger against her jeans even though it was completely dry and unblemished. His mouth was still moving slightly, even in the absence of her finger. In the absence of her.

Inscrutable as always, Maya couldn’t read the fact of where Sam had gone from the empty language of his body, apart from knowing it to be an elsewhere beyond the shape of his bed. Irrevocably out of her grasp.

With the barest of touches, she pushed his lips closed, and went home.


End file.
